This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

perverting the course of justice

Accused of perverting course of justice, woman to appeal against 70% cut in compensation for her ordeal
Lord Judge, the lord chief justice, released the woman from jail in 2010 in a case that altered the way lawyers treat victims who retract rape claims. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA
Helen Pidd The Guardian Monday 30 May 201612.58 BSTLast modified on Monday 30 May 201613.23 BST

A woman who was jailed for falsely retracting a true allegation of rape is to challenge the compensation awarded to her by a court.
The woman, known by the pseudonym Sarah, was sentenced to eight months in 2010 for perverting the course of justice, but she was released on appeal after serving two weeks.

Accused of perverting course of justice, woman to appeal against 70% cut in compensation for her ordeal
Lord Judge, the lord chief justice, released the woman from jail in 2010 in a case that altered the way lawyers treat victims who retract rape claims. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA
Helen Pidd The Guardian Monday 30 May 201612.58 BSTLast modified on Monday 30 May 201613.23 BST

A woman who was jailed for falsely retracting a true allegation of rape is to challenge the compensation awarded to her by a court.
The woman, known by the pseudonym Sarah, was sentenced to eight months in 2010 for perverting the course of justice, but she was released on appeal after serving two weeks.

Exclusive: Sarah said she suffered years of abuse from her brutal partner. But when she reported it to the police, the tables were turned on her and she lost her freedom and her children

Helen Pidd
guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 November 2010 21.34 GMT

At midnight on 28 November last year, Sarah made the phone call she says she thought would save her life. After nine years of abuse from a man she describes as so controlling that she wasn't allowed her own purse, let alone bank card or driving licence, she had finally been pushed over the edge.

The criminal justice system is flawed, and is failing to protect the victims of rape adequately.

It's hard to believe that the views of a 17th-century jurist could have any place in the modern law on rape. Sir Matthew Hale was not enlightened even for his time, with his view that "[a] husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract".

But Hale's rule remained the law until 1991, when the House of Lords at last acknowledged it was "no longer acceptable". Twenty years from now we may well look back on the way today's courts approach rape victims with similar disbelief.

The conviction of a 16-year-old girl for falsely claiming she was raped has caused alarm among campaigners
• Steven Morris
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 January 2011 18.15 GMT

She should have been in a classroom working towards her GCSE exams, making sure she achieves the grades she needs to study photography at college.

Instead after a gruelling three-day trial the teenager found herself in front of a judge being convicted of falsely claiming that she was raped last summer when she was just 15.

The case has caused alarm among anti-rape campaigners and legal experts who believe it is yet another example of the increasing readiness of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue women – or in this case a girl – who in their eyes falsely claim rape.